PORTFOLIO

Phoenixville Public Library will host “Tax-Free Retirement,” an educational workshop, beginning at 7 p.m. Monday, March 24, at 183 Second Ave., Phoenixville.

Patrick Cissne and Brandon Menchaca of OnePenn Financial will be the presenters. This event is free to the public.

“In this economic environment, making the right choices early about taxes in retirement can pay huge dividends,” a news release about the workshop says. “Learn about the financial land mines that destroy many Americans’ seemingly solid retirement plans. Receive ideas and hear real life examples about enjoying a tax-free retirement.”

Job growth in Pennsylvania has slowed steadily over each of the past three years with only about a quarter of the number of jobs created in 2013 as in 2010, the first full year of the economic recovery.

In a new analysis of the state of the economy, the Keystone Research Center found Pennsylvania ranked 48th out of the 50 states in job growth last year — compared to seventh in 2010.

The state’s unemployment rate, meanwhile, has hovered at or above the national jobless rate since mid-2012.

The new analysis updates data released at the end of last summer.

In Chester County, the change in jobs held by county residents, not in non-farm jobs within the county itself, was plus 1,600 jobs in 2010, plus 2,000 jobs in 2011, plus 4,200 jobs in 2012 and minus 1,000 jobs in 2013, according to the report.

“By several measures, Pennsylvania’s recovery is still limping along,” Stephen Herzenberg, an economist and co-author of the report, wrote in a news release.

The new Keystone analysis relies on a full year of publicly available jobs data for 2013.

New jobs were created and unemployment declined in 2013, but as the Keystone report finds, job growth in 2013 was less than a quarter of the 83,600 jobs created in 2010.

The number of new jobs created has declined every year since 2010 — coming in at 45,900 in 2011, 34,600 in 2012, and 19,000 in 2013.

Private-sector job growth followed a similar trajectory — coming in at 88,600 in 2010, 71,700 in 2011, 42,900 in 2012, and 28,200 in 2013.

Pennsylvania’s job ranking among the 50 states has varied over the past decade and a half, going from 27th in 2000 to 40th in 2005 to seventh in 2010 to 48th in 2013.

At the metropolitan and county level, economic trends vary, with only a few areas mirroring exactly the statewide trends of declining job growth each year since 2010. Still, in all but a few metro areas and counties, job growth was lower in 2013 than in 2010, the reports says.

The state’s unemployment rate reached a five-year low in 2013. During the recession and the early years of the recovery, Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate ranged between 1 and 1.5 percentage points below the national average.